Twitter Happiness Scree

Posted on March 31, 2011 by bluedepth

I wrote a series of tweets last night and apparently fell into a rut of profundity. I’ll string them together here for posterity and to share the entire run, since apparently when I get worked up it ends up going on Twitter and not WordPress, which actually I have to work on.

bluedepth
For having infinite faculties, humanity is so very quick to give up on itself and pray to God for intervention. Life is a DIY project!
3/31/11 1:43 AM

bluedepth
Quite tired of how easily people roll over. One peek of hardship and it’s always with the scampering to God, or Jesus. How about yourself?
3/31/11 1:45 AM

bluedepth
Here’s a novel idea: Pray to yourself to get yourself out of trouble. Because, in a way, aren’t you ALREADY DOING THAT? Skip the middlemen!
3/31/11 1:46 AM

bluedepth
Life is hard, Love sucks, People are ugly monsters, but when you find true happiness, THAT is what all this is for. And much like +
3/31/11 1:48 AM

bluedepth
+ everything else in life, a little bit of happiness goes a long way! Same with toothpaste and shampoo. If you can’t find happiness, +
3/31/11 1:49 AM

bluedepth
+ look closer, it’s all around you. You don’t need God, Jesus, or any of the saints to grab a hyacinth, close your eyes and be happy in +
3/31/11 1:50 AM

bluedepth
+ the right here and right now. It’s that sort of thing people have to look for and savor.
3/31/11 1:51 AM

bluedepth
It’s important to close your eyes and shut out the nasty just for a little bit. Do something for just yourself, something good, something+
3/31/11 1:53 AM

bluedepth
+private. No matter what happens, nothing can touch that moment.
3/31/11 1:53 AM

Historical

Posted on March 23, 2011 by bluedepth

Operation Historic Moment has come and gone. The big news, now that the cat is out of the bag and rubbing up against your leg is that WMU received the biggest cash gift in our state, ever. The total is $100 Million dollars. This unthinkably large gift is a godsend, but alas is just the start of what is needed to start training real Doctors. I was centrally involved with a group of coworkers to design this project and bring it off successfully. My role was to address the technology we’d need to make all of this work properly. There were ups and downs and I learned a surprising amount from the experience that I will detail here.

The project had quite a number of technical components to it. Technology served a role at nearly each step of the process and many of the tools that were used made everything faster, better, and easier. The old aphorism that “proper organization will set you free” couldn’t ring any louder for us all than it did for all of our meetings to arrange this entire project. For me it started with tools that before this event I could have only dreamed for in Sci-fi. Specifically I speak of my iPad. My iPad was the perfect device. It was a communications hub, everything from email, my blog, to Twitter and Facebook were available to me whenever I needed them. The single app on the iPad that really helped the most was iThoughts HD. For each meeting we had, and there were many, I used this app to take dynamic notes and record the minutes of the meetings in a beautiful and straightforward fashion that I could then email to our management and show them our progress on the project. All they had to do was sit back and watch as we progressed. It was a delight to use and by suppressing an endless trail of scribbled and crossed out paperwork made what we accomplished in our meetings very easy on the eyes to read.
We had laid out our design from the very start. The first was a series of mystery QR codes that were distributed throughout town. Supermarkets, Delis, and popular hotspots throughout Kalamazoo were dressed up in these QR coded pages. The QR codes loaded a series of photos that lead to hints for anyone together enough to know what a QR was and to scan it. If I could do this part over I would have encoded all the URL’s for the photos using bit.ly so I could track their clickthrough rates and measure if anyone actually scanned any of these codes or if they are, as I feared, a flash in the pan. Thankfully the QR part of the project was free to implement and the only expense were the staff running around town posting these up all over.

The next big thing was the “Livestream” on the Internet. We had contacted a company and the original design was utterly fantastic. They would haul their own data over satellite service to their home office in Detroit and all we would have to do is cope with our network struggling under the strain of all the consumers pulling the live feed down from our vendor. For weeks we had this planned to the last item and then an unforeseen change of venue forced us to scrap the use of a satellite for data transmission. Suddenly we had to rely on our own network for both the upstream and downstream service. Several things from that point exploded in our faces, specifically a product from Cisco Services called CleanAccess was a problem. With the help of the venues IT manager we were able to get both the dry run and the main production signal off the ground and working properly. As some people have noticed, at showtime we suffered a rather embarrassing network failure at Western. Right now all we have are several competing theories, but they all describe the same problem – our event was so popular that our own network couldn’t cope. Personally I was beyond dismay, beyond embarrassment. I was logged into the Bernhard Center countdown clock hardware trying to display the livestream to everyone assembled there and the melted-down network wasn’t going to have any of it. As I sat there, thinking about all the upset people assembled for nothing in the Bernhard Center my mind raced with ways that I could have possibly addressed the situation. Some things did come immediately to mind and most of them involved not using any indigenous technology and relying instead on other Internet providers to ensure that things worked as designed. Like all other instances where something bad happens and you wish you could go backwards in time to fix it, there is no rescuing that mistake – only learning from it. I can’t say that I have much faith in our indigenous network provider, as it collapsed like a house of cards when our event started. I was afraid of network saturation and whatever the real cause was, I’d bet some real money that link saturation was at least a player in the drama. It stings when I have to admit that our successes are more dependent on non-indigenous resources than indigenous ones. It’s not that we actively selected against the indigenous systems, it’s just they never really even came up in our thoughts. I’m happy that much of what we attempted did work and upset that the one singular thing that we allowed to be handled indigenously was so embarrassingly fumbled. The only saving grace at the end is the notion that our message was so popular that it disabled a system designed to resist such things. The Internet really was never designed to resist popularity, only nuclear attack.

We also were responsible for the “Mystery Box” in Bernhard Center. This was a tease for the Countdown Clock Display that later on was constructed in the Mystery Boxes place. Our intent wasn’t to anger people by it’s placement, only to engage them and get them wondering what Western was up to. The clocks themselves were quite impressive and even still I’m amazed that we pulled it off as easily as we did. The clocks, all the guts, and the entire design came together so wonderfully that I still sit back and marvel at how it all played out. This build was rather involved for me and because of that fact, it was the place where most of my “little lessons” cluster. The displays themselves were investments, they cost a bit of money but we’re going to use the tarnation out of them and get every red cents worth out of them. The guts were repurposed technology from our own department and didn’t cost anything. Amongst the lessons I learned, when trying to force Firefox into a Kiosk you have to turn off updates, make sure screensavers and energy-saving features never get activated and to turn off Bluetooth. Because of the design we had to use two independent systems for the two displays, and this in itself created a rather embarrassing and inexplicable oddity to pop up. The two displays were almost perpetually out of time sync with one another. I really can’t explain it, both machines were in the same general space, there is nothing wrong with where they are, yet one machine counted time differently than the other. I have some theories that have to do with processor load and video processing issues and that is the only way I can explain it. The only other solution is that we had a temporal anomaly in the Bernhard Center. I’d expect a gaggle of dead students if we had a spatial anomaly, so it almost has to be my first theory that’s right. Anyhow, each night I would remote into the clocks and resync them. At worst they were about a minute off of each other but sync’ed well at night. The other lesson I learned was that WiFi is useful for many things, but you should never depend upon it. Drawing a network to the location was impossible but I do know what I would do differently next time. Next time I would acquire two free nearby wired network ports and I would set two 802.11N wifi access points on those lines and one machine per access point would be the rule, and the access points would have nothing at all to do with Tsunami, the default Western wifi SSID. Of course this would be a gross violation of network design and probably upset the indigenous service providers, but in some ways I can defend that approach because it would have likely not failed me. Alternatively I was considering acquiring two Verizon EVDO USB Network cards and using those as a wholly independent network sources for my display equipment.

Beyond the livestream and the clocks, the other bits of technology that we used were more bent towards helping us keep coordinated and organized. We made rather good use, even though it’s development was very late in the game, of WordPress.com itself. About 80% of the way through our project I started investigating WordPress.com’s P2 theme. The minute I started to play around with it I fell in love. P2 was perfect for so many things that were on my mind, a way to solve many workplace problems and the fact that WordPress.com was free, easy, so wonderfully supported, and quite robust was all just sauce for this goose. I created a private blog, added the P2 theme to it and rolled it out to everyone on our team. Of course since the blog came online about 80% too late, only a small amount of real work ended up being done with it, however even still, it served as a proof of concept and both P2 and WordPress.com have continuously proven to me just how good they are as a collaboration and communications platform, absolutely worthy of a “Bravo!”. The other system we used was more for coordination and that was GroupMe. I created a GroupMe account and group and populated it with my teammates who had SMS-capable cellular telephones, which was nearly all of them. GroupMe worked very well, and the only hesitation I have for really raving about them comes down to a misfired politeness feature in their core product. If you add a group of people to your GroupMe group and start using the product and some people don’t respond or actively join GroupMe declares that they aren’t in the group any longer out of politeness. Well, you can’t add them back in afterwards no matter how hard you try and some people aren’t supposed to reply, they are just supposed to witness and obtain an survey of the action, especially some in management. The GroupMe service would be better if there was a way to defeat the “politeness” feature and establish a hard-and-fast fixed group to receive text messages irrespective of whether they do or do not reply to any of those messages.
Now that the entire project is over, we are riding high on a wave of a job well done and looking at what failed and what we could have done to address those failures. Every mistake carries within it the seeds needed to avoid them in the future. We pulled off a massive and multifaceted campaign with six primary sectors and each one had fantastic leadership and an utterly delightful minimum of process-clogging bullshit. What lead to our successes? Empowerment, a lack of micromanagement, and utterly shocking levels of interdepartmental cooperation. Almost at every turn when we were afraid we would run into an intractable opponent we discovered to our dazzled chagrin that at each step we could find no enemies laying in wait for us with bear-traps, all we had were instant converts and cheerleaders. I’ve thanked our team many times in the past and once in a previous metablog post about the Western Express engagement platform, but there are some other people who bear thanking now that I have a place to publicly do so:

Our own “Sensational Seven,” which I was a part. If people work this well together for other projects, beware. 🙂
Our Gold People. They remain anonymous but they know who they are and one or two may read this. Nothing like the magic of a mystery figure to goose a campaign right where it counts.
John Stanford at the College of Health and Human Services at WMU. Thank you for on-the-spot help and use of your Category 6 cabling.
Bernhard Center Management were stellar for this entire campaign. Kept what secrets you had to, asked no awkward questions, and went above and beyond with material and resource support. Knowing we had the staff of the Bernhard Center was absolutely instrumental in our Countdown Clocks working as well as they did.
All the Building Coordinators, especially CHHS and Fetzer Center, for being so wonderfully understanding and willing to facilitate our project.
Everyone else, I’m sure I’ve left someone out of this list, but if you were ‘in on it’ even if only a little bit, I thank you here and now.

What’s next? Well, it’s a great start for the Medical School, but in no way are we finished. The need is still very strong and this incredible gift is such a great start. There are more surprises yet to come and more engaging things that the University will see from us here in Development and Alumni Relations. We’ve only scratched the surface of what we can accomplish. As I told the powers that be when they took the reins back in October 2010, “All you need to do is press the Big Red Button.”

Zoom Zoom. 🙂

C2E2 Friday 3/18/2011

Posted on March 19, 2011 by bluedepth

Yesterday we walked through McCormick Place on our way to C2E2. The start of the convention was a touch disorganized as there was very little in the way of a guide to where the holding queue line was supposed to be. Once we found it we queued up and bided our time. The convention started to concern me because there were sessions going from 11am and it was 12:45pm by the time our queue began to process. Scott informed me that we were in the cow-class and that VIP ticket holders could get in much earlier, and that it was meant for them, those early sessions.

Once we got in I immediately saw that this years exhibition hall was significantly bigger than last years c2e2 was. We started to browse the aisles. Scott took off like a shot for artists alley, Sean and Jeff and Chris took off for the line to get the con-special figurine. This year that figurine was a white-lantern Batman and a white-lantern Flash. They all were successful and I went to browse the vendors. The vendors are pretty much laid out in a standard convention format. You’ve got shirt-sellers, music producers, art studios, comic book sellers, and fake weapon smiths. A microcosm of the same exhibitor hall at San Diego Comic Con.

I immediately noticed Comixology there and chuckled at myself. My serious interest in the comics industry is in the realm of digital comics. I firmly believe that paper is dead, very 20th century. As I wandered the aisles I saw tons and tons of old paper for sale and thought to myself just how comical all this was, that it all could be reduced into a tiny little USB memory stick and sold for $10. The biggest thing is to have respect for the dead, even if they don’t know they are dead. It’s one thing to smile at the future you know and quite another to terrify those that either haven’t a clue or are willfully ignoring what is coming.

After we were done with the exhibition hall we attended some DC panels. The Green Lantern panel was all right, many of the panelists were artists and they did a good job of representing DC. Many of the fan questions however required the presence of a writer to answer. One funny thing to come out of this panel was the Green Lantern oath in other languages. Some of the DC artists are French, while their headliner is Portuguese. The artists tried their best to be affable and good hosts and were successful for the most part.

The other DC Panel was less useful. The biggest stumbling block we had was how DC has effectively buried one of their characters, Wally West, who played Flash after Barry Allen was removed from the storyline a while ago. Now that Barry Allen is back, Wally has faded away. This bothers Scott and I can commiserate a little bit in that my favorite character, Kyle Rayner is in a slightly similar predicament. Where Kyle gets some actual play in Green Lantern Corps comic Wally only shows up as Kid Flash in the Young Justice Animated TV Show. I am a little personally bent at the vendors, all the Green Lantern play is for Hal Jordan, which is a character I mildly appreciate but would much rather see MY favorite Lantern featured way more often. I suppose it’s that I identify closer to Kyle’s sensitivity and creativity than Hal’s brusque flyboy persona. Sometimes I get overwhelmed with Hal everywhere and I just want him to “Save The DC Universe” and die for it. Characters that die in that way never really stay dead, but it would be nice to see Kyle, Guy, and John get more showtime in Hal’s death-absence.

The disappearance of Wally West however *is* a serious problem for DC. I appreciate the Flash-verse almost as much as the Lantern one and I see a place for Barry, Wally, Bart and Irey. We’ll have to see how that works and see if DC gets with the program or not.

P2 or Not P2

Posted on March 10, 2011 by bluedepth

Today has been an odd silly day. It started out with an odd fanciful notion to investigate WordPress.org and possibly host it on a Mac Mini. My design was to create a workplace blog, theme it with P2 and whip it out on my coworkers and see how it worked for them. It’s not really a Wiki, we have that, and the Wiki software we use is Apple’s own that comes with their Server OSes, but the blogging component leaves something to be desired.

I saw WordPress.com pushing P2, a theme that fits into WordPress.com or WordPress.org and enables Automattic, the company behind WordPress to communicate more efficiently. My interest was piqued.

So I started with that original idea, then my assistant reminded me that I have a huge monster HP 1U server that I never use and it has Ubuntu on it. I had a little Eureka moment and decided I could work with that. I downloaded the WordPress.org software and went over the installation manual. I got everything edited and in-place and looking nice in the terminal window but couldn’t get the wp-admin/install.php screen to appear so I could finish the WordPress.org installation. I futzed and putzed and figured out I was missing some things, like a different kind of PHP, as well as PHPmyadmin. Once I added all of those various bits I tried it again. No dice. I finally figured out that when I created the “wordpress” MySQL database and user that I botched up the name and host information and didn’t see it until I blundered my way into PHPmyadmin. With that tool I fixed the problem and then everything was fine. I installed JetPack Plug-in, which promptly exploded in my face. JetPack needs to chat back and forth between WordPress.com and whatever machine you are installing WordPress.org on. This server here is firewalled on the wire and can’t be seen by any outside-to-WMU system, so that put the kibosh on JetPack. I still wanted to try P2, so I installed it and it worked like a charm. Then I ran into the same headache I always run into with these systems: SMTP. Here at WMU there is a huge barrier to access any network services, especially SMTP. So how could a WordPress.org P2 blog ever really work right if the server it’s running on can’t ever send out email properly? Oh, I tried to be clever and I failed. I tried to forge a CA, I tried lots of hints to try to masquerade into smtp.gmail.com using TLS, and I tried sendmail and postfix. Bloody hell. I would rather eat glass than have to see sendmail.cf again. I’d rather massage the tongue of a rabid wolverine than futz with postfixes main.cf file again! I mashed my head up against that brick wall until I took a step back and asked myself why the hell I was going to these lengths for something so tangential.

So then it struck me, if we’re using WordPress.com for the heavy lifting for most of our content management, why couldn’t I just create a new blog for our workgroup, slap P2 on it and carry on? That had its own problems. In the beginning I set everything up with Western Express and set my “Gravatar” to be associated with my work email address of andy.mchugh@wmich.edu. All fine and good until you try to use that address anywhere else! WordPress is picky. So I logged into WordPress.com thinking I could change my accounts email address in WordPress, as it turns out, you can’t. You have to go to Gravatar and change it there. It’s not so much change as put in a new address, switch it to primary, then rip out the old address. A lot of work for something that was supposed to be easy. Blargh!

So I got everything switched around and freed my work email address then re-approached WordPress as if I was a new user. I logged in using my work address (which is the most appropriate address for this pursuit) and created an account. I got the automated email verification message and clicked on it. WordPress refused with the error: “Could not create user” and so I emailed support at WordPress for help. Still waiting to get some TLC from the support people as of the writing of this blog-post.

Along with all of this I’m wondering if P2 will be well received? Will my coworkers see this as one more silly thing that I’m making them all use? I’ve pounded Wiki use into their heads, I’ve done a lot of things behind the scenes that none of them see now but will that will also radically change their working lives (for the better I assure you) and then I sit and wonder. I wonder if P2 is a solution that could work for us? If it works for Automattic, shouldn’t it work for us as well? I’m on the fence on this. I’ve whipped out so much new technology on these people, will they accept another massive change to how they communicate or will I be facing open revolt? I see this idea of mine shaped this way:

A private group blog that everyone can log into anywhere they are in the world, obviating the need to use any kind of VPN system as WordPress.com is available ubiquitously. It would enable people to hold online communications, post instantly like Twitter, post without limit to text (unlike Twitter), include rich content such as YouTube embeds and such all the while managing the conversations and using categories and tags to track different sections of our communication infrastructure. I imagine using P2 as I would have maybe used Google Wave if it was matured properly and supported by Google and not killed in its infancy. That we’d use several big tags such as “Donors” and “Help Desk” along with a constellation of other tags and not have to struggle with email distribution lists and missing information and delayed communications, all of that could be eliminated. On the flip side of that argument is “This is one more thing that you are forcing on us and making us learn.” I’m struggling with how P2 could fit in with our lives and whether this is a valid pursuit or just so much “chasing after the shiny”.

There are several of my coworkers that I’m nearly certain would go stark raving mad if I whipped just one more thing out on them. I just can’t deny the allure of all of these services, WordPress, DropBox, 1Password, Evernote… that their ubiquity online and their omnipresence in the mobile computing sphere is terribly attractive to me. That a workforce that I deeply suspect will be forced to become more mobile and nimble almost demands that I continue this breathless rush towards the bleeding edge.

So what I really would like is to find anyone other than Automattic who found P2 to be useful. It would gratify me immensely to know that P2 was a ‘game-changer’ and serve also as confirmation that I am on the right path and that this whole charge towards shiny actually serves a true and honest business purpose beyond my wanderlust for novelty.

As always, I would really love people to comment, I’m looking for evaluations, opinions, you name it, every bit helps. I thank you all in advance. 🙂

iPhone App Review

Posted on March 4, 2011 by bluedepth

In an earlier post I wrote about how I promised you all an iPhone App review, so without further waiting, here it is. In this review I will be skipping any apps that also appear on my iPad, as I’ve pretty much exhaustively covered those apps, unless the iPhone brings a fresh perspective that I didn’t have with my iPad. Just so that everyone is on the same page, my iPad is a 16GB Wifi only model, and the first generation. My iPhone is also a 16GB model and linked to Verizon, it’s fourth generation. On with the show…

iPhone 4 App Review

Evernote – The recently updated Evernote app is without a doubt one of the single most awesome and compelling apps on my iPhone. The new interface works so much better than the previous iteration of the app on the iPhone device. I am patiently waiting for this kind of refreshing redesign to happen for the Evernote for iPad app as well. Every time I open Evernote, I can’t help but think back to struggling with the very same app on my old Blackberry. The difference? Night and Day.
Photography Group
1. Camera – The baked in Camera app for the iPhone 4 comes with the device. The controls are very easy and it was a definite pleasure to see that the app does stills and video, and can be configured for either camera, the front-facing or rear-facing.
2. Camera+ – This app borrows a lot of structure from the plain Camera app. It has a different zoom feature, timed shutter, burst mode, advanced flash handling and a pretty neat focus-fixing gesture system which I’ve yet to really get into. The app also has it’s own “Camera Roll” beyond the plain system one, and this allows you to edit the photos, crop them and apply some pretty cool filters. You can of course export any photos you take from the apps “Camera Roll” to the system “Camera Roll”, so it’s quite handy.
3. Panorama – I haven’t really gotten a chance to play around with this one, it was free, eventually I’ll get to trying it out.
4. Instagram – The collision of social media and photography! This app is great. You can configure Twitter, Facebook, Posterous, Flickr, Tumblr, and FourSquare all from the app itself. Take a picture, apply one of its old-timey filters if you want, and then send the photo at once to all the services or specific ones you choose. So far very happy with it.
5. FoodSpotting – This is more niche than Instagram. It works a lot like Instagram but it’s for food in restaurants. You take a picture and you can share it. The only gripe I have about FoodSpotting is the setup for the social services aren’t very clear, it’s nothing like any other app I’ve used and I kept on hitting my head against a mysterious login box until I realized I had to put in my FoodSpotting.com username and password. Oops. Once it’s off the ground, it’s very handy.
Utilities Group –
1. Clock – The clock app is one of those baked-in apps that come with the device. I almost never review the baked in apps, except for this one case. There appears to be a gremlin that still lives in this app. I have a handful of alarms, and whether the alarm is on or off doesn’t matter. So far it doesn’t suffer from the previous problem of “alarm doesn’t fire”, but it’s odd in that alarms fire even if they are “Off”. I think this app is still a work-in-progress for Apple’s iOS team to work on.
2. Voice Memos – This app still has a use for really long audio recordings. It’s lost a fair amount of power when Evernote redid their app and added audio recording – so you could technically audio-record right into your Evernote system. I suppose you could use this app and then email the audio into Evernote later, perhaps it’s six and one half-dozen kind of thing.
Facebook – The Facebook app is odd. It’s there for the iPhone but not the iPad. I’ll never understand that. The app works well enough, it’s pretty straightforward and if you have a facebook account, you should get it. I don’t know many people who don’t have a facebook account any longer.
Social Group
1. Glympse – I wrote about Glympse when I had it on my iPad. The system really shines when you have a 3G network connection or if you insist on running it on the iPad, to have a 3G-to-Wifi bridge as you are mobile. I used Glympse with my mother and she loved it. She thought it was really neat. You send a “glympse” to an email addressee and they get a link they can click on and see your position, speed, and path in real-time. The only part of this app that irks me is the expiration to “glympses”. I would prefer to hand my mother a link that would always work if I was running “Glympse” on my iPhone, she would know where I am whenever she liked. Some people see this as an invasion of privacy, but really, what do you have to hide? Come on.
2. Bump – I got this free app to share some pictures that Scott had on his iPhone. Bump works well when the datasets are small. If you want to share a LOT of data, like a bunch of pictures in a Camera Roll on the device, prepare for disappointment. Bump really didn’t work out for me. Another app, which I reviewed on my iPad, called Transfer works much better for moving big data sets between iOS devices.
Travel Group –
1. Trapster – Before the price of fuel went to obnoxiously high levels I used to have a relatively leaded foot when it came to driving. I regularly find myself pushing 76 in a 70 zone and I’ve been caught “Not Paying Full Attention” to speed zones in the past. This app allows you to share socially the presence of speed traps and other road hazards. Since I keep my speed now pretty much below 60MPH to save on gas costs most of the reason to use this app have gone out the window, but I keep it around, it’ll likely be really helpful on long-duration trips.
2. StreetPilot – Garmin’s Nuvi interface designed for iOS. I can enter in an address or do a Google Location search and have yet to find something it can’t route me to. This app has vocal turn-by-turn directions and is as “helpful” as a Nuvi. One of the nicest things is that the maps will never go out of date as it downloads map data from Garmin automatically. When I start this app my mind goes back to the Sprint Navigation app on my Blackberry, powered by Telenav. This app, StreetPilot, blows that old Telenav application out of the water. Again it’s night and day. I would never use the Telenav junk because it never worked. So far StreetPilot has not let me down once. Again it’s because an iPhone is a supremely more advanced and better-equipped phone than the Blackberry could ever dream of being.
3. TripIt – Making big trips, with airplanes and hotels usually is handled somewhat well using Evernote, but not any longer. TripIt is a free app and free web service that enables you to organize all your travel details through one very well designed app. What really blows my mind is the web service provides you with an email address that you can forward your confirmation emails to and the service will automatically extract the details from what you forwarded and populate your trip for you. Incredibly handy. The fact that it’s free blows my mind.
1Password – I have this app on my iPad, my iPhone and every Mac I own. Without a doubt the single BEST purchase and BEST investment I ever made, beyond buying into the Apple Digital Lifestyle. What makes it shine? Sync with Dropbox. Everything is the same on every device. Everyone should buy apps from 1Password, then use the app to change each site they have an account on with the random generator in 1Password and control them all from that suite of apps. When one site suffers a security breakdown, your loss is microscopic. You lost 1 of thousands of 16 digit random passwords. This app is worth its weight in GOLD. I’m so happy my mother pushed me towards it!
Business Group
1. DraftPad – If ever you needed just a quick place to jot down some text, this app does a pretty good job. It’s free, it’s very simple to use, and does one thing, taking quick temporary notes, very well.
2. CamCard – I downloaded the Lite version of this app. It enables your phone to take a picture of a business card and then it scans in the details, does OCR, and populates your Contact List with the details from the card. Very useful. I got the Lite version because I almost never get business cards but when I do, it’s nice to have this as an option.
Scanners Group
1. Qrafter – This app from Kerem Erkan is free on the App Store and is the BEST QR Code scanner I’ve ever had the pleasure to use. It’s professional, free, and the way it scans, presents the contents of the scan and all the extended features that it can pick up from a QR code is wonderful! There are a few other QR scanners and they are okay, but this one is the top of my list without a doubt!
2. QR Creator – Kerem Erkan, on his website, also has a QR creator page which has a special mobile rendering on iPhone devices. I browsed to it in Mobile Safari and then made an app-icon-bookmark. You can create custom QR codes and save them to your Camera Roll and print them using AirPrint or send them to someone else via email or even Evernote or Dropbox! Quite nice.
3. PriceCheck – This app from Amazon.com is a great way to check on local stores profiteering. Just grab an object from the shelf, open this app, scan the bar code with the camera and Amazon will spit out it’s best prices for that item. I’ve yet to use it for more than simply checking on things to see how the scanner worked, but it does work. I’m pretty sure you can one-click order through the App if you set it up with your Amazon login information. That would be too-funny. Especially for Best Buy, Target, and Bed Bath and Beyond. Low prices my ass. 🙂
4. RedLaser – This works a lot like PriceCheck but isn’t tied to Amazon.com. I have used this app and it’s saved both of us some money and aggravation. There is a scented candle that Scott really likes in the bathroom and it’s a big one, the price tag from BB&B was $22 bucks. He wanted another candle just like it for the bathroom but couldn’t remember what it was called or who made it. While I was in the bathroom I fished it out of the garbage and scanned it using RedLaser. Not only did it find the right make and scent but also found it online for HALF THE PRICE. I then tapped the option button in RedLaser and right there was “email this info” option, I sent it to Scott and minutes later he was thanking me. Don’t thank me, thank that app! 🙂
5. Color ID – I have what I regard as accurate color vision. Scott on the other hand can from time to time run into trouble identifying colors. This free app is cute, you start it, point the camera at an object and press the shutter button. The phone will calculate the color, give you its “creative name”, its hex code for inclusion on websites, and it will read the color off via voice from the speaker. I spent half an hour identifying all the colors in my bathroom. For anyone challenged with color blindness, this app is a godsend. The only oddity with the app is that it doesn’t like being sent to the background. Once you put it in the background and then call it up again the scanning part doesn’t work. You have to quit the app and restart it. Even with this oddity it’s still quite useful.
GroceryIQ – This app is sort of a scanner, sort of a listmaker, but it floats outside of other groups because it’s different. I like using this app more than ShopShop because the way it’s designed fits better with trips to the supermarket. I love it’s listmaking and check off features. The scanner is quite dumb, and while you can scan an item and put it on the list, it’s just as easy to type it in by hand.

So that’s that. Those are the apps on my iPhone that differ from my iPad apps. It’s nowhere near the exhaustive list of all the apps I have, but these are the ones I felt warranted the most discussion and I think other people would benefit from using. I’m open to reviewing other apps, if you are an app developer please feel free to drop me a line or make a comment and I’ll check out your app and give you my honest opinion or even a review. If you find something in my reviews that helps you, please comment and let me know!

Hall of Mirrors

Posted on February 26, 2011 by bluedepth

The landscape of social media is a hall of mirrors. There are so many services that I’m on, and they all seem to conflict or collide with partial fits, all have different audiences, it’s terribly confusing. So far I’m registered with these providers:

WordPress.com
Twitter
Facebook
Tumblr
Posterous
FourSquare
Ping.FM
Instagram

So far I’m approaching these services as individual pockets of social engagement. I really need to decide what I am going to put on each of these services. The trouble comes when you find that all these services have in some limited ways cross-linking. It seems like a waste to share to each of these services but there is an in-built concern that if you close a service you are somehow cutting off real audience or potential audience. If a service is free, then why not use it?

There are some services that definitely are built for certain things. WordPress is great for really long-form blogging. Twitter is great for short-status-update messaging and link-sharing, Facebook has an odd blend of every service – using Notes for long-form blogging, using status updates for short-status-updates, plus all the picture and video hosting you could want which pretty much marks off the next two… Posterous and Tumblr. They kind of float in the nether-space outside of the previous three. Instagram is bound tightly with its iOS App, so it is social but only tangentially so and Ping.FM is more of a tool than an actual destination, so the tangent gets even further out.

WordPress publicizes to Facebook and Twitter, Facebook can be linked from WordPress and Twitter and Twitter itself? Anything can be linked to and from that service. In many ways it comes down (at least for the big three) a matter of audience. There are friends and family on Facebook who aren’t on Twitter, there are people on Twitter that aren’t on Facebook, but since WordPress publicizes to both platforms, it’s the equal opportunity platform.

I suppose my feeling of waste really comes down to Posterous and Tumblr. They seem like utter duplicates of each other. I can’t really say that placing content on either service adds any value, it’s just easy to crosslink them to all the others. Even when it comes to drop-in-one-place-spread-everywhere the two of them are almost identical. Each service champions what they provide, but even still, there is almost no information on why someone would choose Posterous over Tumblr, or Twitter for that matter, when you factor in all the “helper” sites such as TwitLonger, yFrog, and all of those.

There is a part of me that wants to crisscross Twitter and Facebook, but even there I’m conflicted. Not everyone on Facebook would appreciate the “nuclear follow cost” that my Twitter stream commands. I’ve kind of left Facebook to be a destination-dump for all the other services to send to. FourSquare sends to Facebook, WordPress sends to Facebook, as well as all the others except Twitter.

I think this entire segment needs to undergo a consolidation event, where a few winners are selected and their usefulness is clear to see and different from all the others. In the meantime, those that follow me have grown used to how I share information so I presume that maintaining the status quo will keep the boat afloat. I just wish there was a clear reason to select one over the other and resolve this tangle of odd duplication.